


Look on my works

by captainofthegreenpeas



Category: Historical RPF, Original Work
Genre: Afterlife, Elizabethan, Enemies to Friends, Gen, Historical Accuracy, Historical Fantasy, Metafiction, Original Fiction, Reconciliation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-14
Updated: 2018-06-14
Packaged: 2019-05-23 06:22:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,400
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14928870
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/captainofthegreenpeas/pseuds/captainofthegreenpeas
Summary: Following his death and burial, the spirit of Francis Walsingham is sent to a mysterious room where he is reunited with his defeated arch-nemesis, Mary Stuart.In order to move on to the next world, the two must reach an understanding and reconciliation.





	Look on my works

**Author's Note:**

> A brief glossary on characters and places (no spoilers for the story in here)  
> Sir Francis Walsingham- Elizabeth I’s Principal Secretary. Died April 1590.  
> Mary Stuart- the deposed Queen of Scots, executed for treason against Elizabeth in Feb. 1587.  
> Frances- Walsingham’s oldest daughter. Widow of Sir Philip Sidney.  
> The Earl of Essex- the Earl of Leicester’s stepson, Frances’ second husband.  
> Burghley- William Cecil, Lord Treasurer and a chief adviser to Elizabeth.  
> Mary Walsingham- Walsingham’s younger daughter. Died as a child.  
> Ursula- Walsingham’s second wife, of 24 years, and widow. Mother of Frances and Mary Walsingham.  
> Robert Beale- Walsingham’s brother-in-law and deputy, clerk to the Privy Council.  
> Edie (Edith) Beale- Ursula’s sister, Beale’s wife.  
> Christopher- Walsingham’s stepson, by his first wife.  
> Alice- Walsingham’s stepdaughter, by his first wife.  
> Phelippes- codebreaker, Walsingham’s right hand in spycraft.  
> Mary Tudor- Elizabeth’s older half-sister and predecessor as queen. Wife of Philip of Spain.  
> Paulet- Mary Stuart’s jailer.  
> Barn Elms- Walsingham's home in Surrey  
> Odiham- Walsingham's home in Hampshire  
> 6 Seething Lane- Walsingham's London home

The queen would not be visiting today. There was work to be done; and deathbeds are boring. Fate had not allowed her to be at Leicester’s side when he died, so why should she make the effort for him?  
Seething Lane was in no fit state for a royal welcome. A shouting match was buzzing through the bedroom door. Robert Beale had never been a quiet man; and slowly encroaching deafness made Walsingham’s brother-in-law even louder, no matter how much he grumbled about people these days always mumbling. The venerable Edie Beale had joined in, her Somerset accent increasing in strength the angrier she became. Between the two of them, Walsingham supposed that his physician was feeling more than a little besieged. He groaned and pulled a pillow over his head to block out the noise. It did not help his monstrous headache. He felt like he was being repeatedly hit around the head with a copy of Foxe’s Book of Martyrs (extended edition). The hem of his nightshirt was sticky with blood.

Indeed, there would be no more visitors today. Christopher was busy ploughing through Ireland in the queen’s name and studiously ignoring his stepfather’s insistence that he locate the nearest plump widow and marry her before he was too old for children. His Denny cousins were in Ireland; and he missed them just as much. Years ago, they had followed him into exile, like a troop of ducklings behind their mother. Their parents were both dead, so it had fallen to him to make sure they were clean and godly and awake before noon. Alice was too ill to visit, Frances too married; and only too aware of how her new husband was held in contempt by her parents. He had hoped he might see his granddaughter, just once more. They had prayed for her father’s soul together, and walked slowly around the garden at Barn Elms while he taught her the names of all the plants she stretched out her little fingers to touch. All he could do now was pray the Earl of Essex might prove a better father than a soldier. The wrong man came back from Zutphen, but nothing good came of reminding himself of that fact. Talking to Essex was like watching a known arsonist walking through carefully tended woodland; and waiting for the inevitable destruction to happen.

He could only lie, wedged between two featherbeds. The bedstrings wanted tightening and were starting to sag in the middle, which would have given him backache, were his back not already aching. He fumbled for his prayer book but found only his table-book instead. Francis let it fall with a dismal flop on the floor.

He woke again to silence.  
Ursula was asleep at the desk across the room, her head pillowed on her folded arms. Piles of bills and letters rose around her, gilded by the afternoon sun. He was not sure whether his wife was suffering from exhaustion or another one of the melancholic humours that made her sleep so much. Francis dragged himself to the edge of the bed, trying to rise and wrap a blanket around her shoulders. Sitting made his stomach roil; and he collapsed. He tried to call to her, but his voice had gone; and could have been swallowed by a draught from under the door for all that it made her stir.

He had been moved to a new bed, with tighter strings and fresh linen. Walsingham tried not to dwell on the humiliation of being carried and cleaned like a child and wondered where the cats had gone instead. He was used to long days and longer nights of work, slipping his silver pen from his right hand to his left once he was quite sure his staff were sound asleep at their desks. Seething Lane’s mousers-in-residence made surprisingly pleasant company as the days slipped into each other, into a cycle of working past dusk and sleeping at dawn. One of them always stubbornly ignored the plump cushion he left out; and elected to fall asleep right on top of his papers. Walsingham had been suspicious at first, but had reassured himself that no self-respecting witch would choose such a lazy creature as her familiar. Besides, Phelippes doted on the silly animal, calling him Melchisedec and bringing him little fishes, and a happy Phelippes was a productive Phelippes. Still, they had to be careful to leave intercepted correspondence spotless, lest Philip of Spain become suspicious about the number of cat hairs on his letters.

There was still so much left undone. It was as dangerous for a patient for his surgeon to leave halfway through the operation as it was for his ills to be left untended. Burghley would not live forever, though Walsingham did not doubt that he would try. Philip of Spain was still out there, and Robert Persons, William Allen, Paget, Morgan. Ireland would vomit any medicine they tried to force down her throat.  
The queen would not live forever, either.

Part of him longed to live even just a little longer. It was the beginning of April, not too far from summer. Summer had been his favourite season from childhood. The long hours of daylight allowed Francis to read surreptitiously when he was supposed to be going to sleep.  
One summer many years before, he had invited the now-dead Dudley brothers to Odiham. It was Friday, so naturally they helped themselves to wine from Francis’ cellars. By the time the stars were fully out in the sky, Walsingham was giggling like a girl and telling unprintable jokes about the Pope as he slowly slid off his chair, Leicester was weeping and telling the other two just how much they meant to him and Warwick got it into his head that he was an excellent singer. (He was not.) The night had ended with the three of them tobogganing down a steep hill on his estate on a truckle bed, the sheet billowing behind them like a sail. At breakfast, they all received disapproving looks from their respective wives, who were nursing wine-induced headaches of their own. It fell to Walsingham to destroy the evidence; and he was confident he had succeeded. As Burghley, that maker of manners, was fond of tediously reminding everyone, such behaviour was not the kind of example they should be setting the lower orders.  
There was no more time to think on that. The church bells beyond were chiming; and his eyes were closing, just as Ursula began to stir.

He did not recognise the third room. The world beyond the windows was cloak-black, as the shapes of old and broken furniture seemed to shift and whisper. He thought he could hear his mother’s laughter, or his sister singing on the stairs. Dust spiralled over charred paper, like breath steaming in cold air. A pair of white seashells that Ursula had kept from a beach on the Isle of Wight sat in a ring of old barrel hoops. A doll’s head watched him from on top of a barrel of salted fish. A white shadow was stained on the wall from where a crucifix had been pulled off. All pain had gone; and its absence resonated like a phantom limb. His mind no longer felt marshy, but stretched flat and clear, yet still there was a rushing in his head like blood.

“ _You_.”  
The shock and revulsion at seeing her again overpowered any surprise that his voice had returned. He immediately ruled out the possibility that he was dreaming. She had not appeared in his nightmares since her execution, it was that wretched dog instead, staring up at him and keening pitifully as the flesh drained away beneath its matted hair. If he were to imagine her, it would almost certainly be with her head _off_.

“Leave me,” Walsingham commanded. “I have nothing more to say to you.” She kept watching him.  
The sudden alarming thought arrested him that this might be Purgatory. He started to panic. This was not fair. Nobody had warned him about Purgatory existing, except the Catholics, and they didn’t count.

“Where are we?” Francis asked eventually, loath to talk to her, but since she showed no sign of leaving, he wanted answers. “And where is the Lord? This is not reunion with God.”  
“No,” Mary Stuart agreed. “This is not the Purgatory I was expecting.”  
“If Purgatory were real, it would say so in the Bible.”  
Mary rolled her eyes. “You sound like Paulet.”  
“Why are you here? What does it profit you to haunt me?”  
“Why would I know? I’ve been here since I was buried. I think…I might have been waiting for you.”  
Francis blinked several times. That was not in the Bible.  
“Is this usually what happens? Is there only ever one waiting for another?” He imagined More and Cromwell might have a lot to talk about. Another thought made an unwelcome appearance.  
“How long must we stay in here for? Are we here to be reconciled?” The old proverb that the sun should never set on a quarrel was one of his first wife’s favourites, yet he had always understood it to mean between friends.  
“The Lord works in mysterious ways,” was all Mary could reply. Walsingham frowned.  
“I had enough of your malevolent works in life, I did not want to suffer any more of them in death.”  
“Me? You’re the one who had my head cut off and you put me on trial like a common thief!”  
“You are treated as a thief when you try to steal a throne that is not yours!”  
She scowled at him; and in doing so looked very like her cousin.  
“You cannot deny you wanted me to. All of you, you always liked my suffering. You could not wait to hack me to death. That up-jumped little Boleyn strumpet got a French swordsman, and what do I get? Daughter of a king, mother of a king, wife of a king, cousin of a queen, what do I get? An axe, and a muttonhead who can’t swing it straight!”

It took a moment for Walsingham to find a reply. He had thought to point out that she was no longer a queen, but not even he could deny her birth.  
“That was… not as clean as I pictured it in my head. You had to die before the queen could stop me, there was no time to arrange it properly. Had there been the time, do you really think I am foolish enough to put personal satisfaction above the queen’s reputation? If I truly wanted your death to be as painful as possible, would I not have seen it for myself?”  
Mary’s expression shifted slightly, which Francis took to mean she was tempted to believe him, grudgingly.  
“I looked for you, that day, but you were not there. I expected you to be sitting in the front row, no doubt with a cup of roasted chestnuts that you would insist on eating obnoxiously loudly.”  
“I never eat at executions.” He had only attended a few; and at Campion’s most of the crowd quickly lost their appetite. Phelippes looked like he was about to be sick and Myles clapped his hands over his ears, but Walsingham smiled serenely as Campion’s fatty organs popped and hissed on the embers like bacon frying in a pan.

“I heard a rumour that Queen Catherine liked to watch torture; yet you did not. Is it true?”  
“Why should I tell you? If I say no, you’ll damn me as cruel, if I say yes, you’ll damn her and call me weak.”  
“I’m curious, even if I am dead. You were weak either way. Were I you, I would have taken off all of their heads, with patience and careful planning. Moray, Morton, Maitland, Bothwell, Knox, all of them- though perhaps not Maitland, your Michael Wylie would have been more useful alive than dead.”  
“You condemned me as a killer, yet now you tell me I did not kill enough?” Mary’s hand curled, possibly on the verge of slapping him.  
“You were a prince, you would always be a killer. Better a few heads on spikes than many dead in the field, with empty coffers for your trouble. You could have killed loyal subjects with the gunpowder you set for Darnley, you _idiot_ -”  
“ _I never murdered him!_ ”  
“Someone did, clearly. You should have killed him before they could blame you for it. You had your heir, with Darnley’s claim to England through him, what more did you need from the worthless sot? The moment he had the pox, Fortune was giving you his life on a plate. If you had not the will to smother him with a pillow, you should have poisoned him. Then shed a few tears, slice a few tongues for slander, and barter with France for another husband. I imagine your new betrothed would have had the wits to be more meek and courteous than his predecessor.”  
The temptation was too great. Mary Stuart slapped him across the face, which reminded him which family she came from.  
“I will not have petty treason on my conscience!”  
“ _Petty_ treason. A loose cannon endangering the ship of state must be tied down or go overboard. He betrayed you first when he murdered your secretary. Speaking for the craft of secretaries; such an act should not go unavenged. Perhaps we ought to have formed a guild.”

Mary flinched at the mention of Rizzio. “You have no right to tell me I did not do enough. I did everything I possibly could to save him; I begged them to stop even after they dragged him away from me and pointed a gun in my _face_. Do you have any idea what it is to be trapped? Can you possibly imagine in your spiteful little head what it is to hear someone screaming as they’re butchered outside the door?”  
“I do not need to imagine.” Francis told her quietly. “I remember well enough. Hundreds of them, and I saw the bodies too. They floated down the Seine, like bloated bleached water lilies. I remember the survivors, they screamed as well, hammering on my front door at all hours. I hid a man whose sons were slaughtered in front of him. Do you want to know what that looks like? He sat rather as you do now, as my daughter chattered away to him about her dolls. I took one look at his face and thought that I’d rather see every Catholic hang from Alnwick to Tintagel than suffer his fate. I hold your family guilty for that butchery. Believe me, if they had laid a hand upon my children I’d have strangled you to death with your own rosary and never mind what holy glue some papist bishop smeared you with.”

“You’re not the only one with children,” Mary retaliated. “You walled me up alive like a failed Vestal and left my son in the hands of my enemies. He was my only son, the one good thing that happened for so long. How many bodies do you think I was ready to climb over to get him back?”  
“Hundreds, I do not doubt. Or thousands, or hundreds of thousands. I did not want to find out.” Francis’ words remained curt, but their venom had dissipated. “But the feeling’s seldom mutual, isn’t it? My daughter married a man I despise without so much as a by-your-leave, and your son left you unavenged. Apparently, a king’s mother is priced at four thousand pounds a year.”  
“Disgraceful. I’m worth at least six.”  
Francis smiled wryly, but did not miss the hurt in her voice.  
“You could have at least reunited me with _my_ mother. My last request was to be buried in France. Could you not have given me that, at least? Why did you have to leave me in Fotheringhay all summer, unburied, unable to move on? Why couldn’t you send my body home, instead of Peterborough? Where even is Peterborough?”  
“You betrayed the queen; I did not owe you anything. You would have extended the same courtesy to me, I am quite sure. My head would have been mounted on a spike and if London Bridge still employed the same idiots as the last time I passed under it, my head would be on that spike _backwards_.”  
Even to his ears, however, it sounded petulant. In truth, at the time his only thought on the matter had been an observation that Peterborough seemed to be the ditch for unwanted queens. He had not expected to be upbraided for it.

“Perhaps it was a little cruel. What does it profit you to lament? It would seem we are both dead and buried. We are past the power to intervene. We can only look upon what we have done.”  
“If I have no reason to remain angry, then neither do you.” Mary countered. “I knew I would be your enemy until the day I died. Well, that day has come and gone. What do we do now?”  
“I must confess, I did not plan this far ahead.” Francis admitted. “But I was told to bless those who curse me, so that might be a start.”

“In truth, I always preferred my honest enemies to my false friends. I never thought a man with so many spies would be so honest. I told your brother Mildmay as much, when I met him. What does it mean for my life, that you’re not even the worst man I’ve ever met, and you are the reason I’m dead?”

Francis pondered in his heart. “It was inevitable that I would be your enemy. There was no other way. It did not matter how much power you had or did not have, your presence on the face of the earth was a danger to my queen; and my queen was the rock my house was built upon. I could not suffer you to live. I could not suffer any danger to live.”

Even if there had been another way, it did no good to think of what could have been or should have been. There was no point in thinking of all the poetry that would never blossom under Phillip Sidney’s pen, or the children that Mary Walsingham would never have, or a united Christian communion, loving and sure.

“And what if your queen had no right to her throne, as I do not believe she did? What if I were your true queen, ordained by God? Would I be your enemy still?”  
“Yes.”  
Mary’s eyes widened. “You would commit treason?”  
“Would? I did.”  
It felt strange to speak of it after so many years, but there was no danger in confessing now. No one else need know. “I paid no more respect to the old king’s dying wishes than I paid to yours. Edward was my true king, not that great mound of suet in silk, and Jane Grey was his chosen heir. She had royal blood, married parents, and the true faith. In my mind, Northumberland’s ambitions were irrelevant, no matter how many people hated him for them, no matter how many loved Lady Mary. I would not call that treason, but… Mary took the throne, and I rose with Wyatt.” Buried memories seemed to be creeping around the edges of the room. He remembered the cost he had borne. “I had no choice. My fellow conspirators would have betrayed me for a pardon, or they would have hanged. I only- I simply cut out the middle man. They were dead before they could realise what was happening. It was not _betrayal_ , it was mercy. They had a proper burial, once I found a priest I could blackmail.” He had followed his own law then, and God’s when the two overlapped. It fell to Walsingham to destroy the evidence; and he was confident he had succeeded.

“You hypocrite,” Mary breathed.  
“I was young, with more will than wisdom. I had not yet learned how to check my own impulses.”  
“And what of the Jesuits you’ve murdered? Were they not also headstrong young men? Or do you believe you deserved to die for your treason, since they died for theirs?”  
“That- that is completely different! I was protecting the true faith from the peddlers of superstition!”  
“True faith? Look at where we are! If either of our faiths were completely true, neither of us would be here!”  
The two relapsed into silence, until Mary sighed.  
“I used to think you were Elizabeth’s hound, but you are not that at all. You’re not her hound, you’re her cat: a disgusting, moulting cat, bubbling with worms, offering her the heads of little birds. I hope she’s at least grateful for them.”  
“She hates me. She needs me. She hates that she needs me.”

Elizabeth’s words promised to always be the same, but one could never be entirely sure if dearly beloved Deborah was going to be the same Minerva or the same Circe. He could remember times when she called him Moor with something that was almost affection, if he listened closely enough. She visited him at Barn Elms once, and told him to wear any colour that was not black. He wore a very dark grey instead, and received the same look of exasperation from the queen that Burghley got when he brought a book to a bear baiting. As children, they once shared a Latin lesson at Hunsdon. Frustrated at being ignored in favour of her brother, she flicked ink at him when Ascham’s back was turned. Walsingham rather supposed that set the tone of their working relationship. He tried to banish Hunsdon from his mind as much as possible. When he did not, Francis remembered the queen he had rebelled against. He used to bowl old barrel hoops past the spot where she would read with a companion. One afternoon, she had put down her book to join them in a game of bowls on the green. They had spoken of nothing of consequence, and yet-  
“I made her laugh,” he said aloud.  
“Who?”  
“The queen whose death I celebrated, because it meant that I could go home.” He looked back at the room’s other occupant.  
“Mary.” It felt strange to call her that. She had always been the Scottish Queen, or the serpent, or just her.

“Easier to hate someone you can’t see, isn’t it?” Living tears stood in her dead eyes. “Not that any of this matters. It doesn’t matter who we were, not really. We’re dead, they can say whatever they like about us now. They will use us; and they will use what you’ve done.”

Francis picked up the thread of her thought. “Of course. They will mould us and shape us into whatever they need us to be, like one of my daughters’ dolls. Stuff us with words and move us to their own design.”  
“You’re no more a monster than I am,” Mary realised. “But that’s an epiphany only we share. We’re dead. We will have no more power to speak than the pagan gods did at Christ’s coming.”

“You should have been a philosopher. You were wasted as a queen,” Francis told her dryly.

“People want to choose a side, there’s the point. One of us has to be the dragon, if the other one’s St George, or the crowd will have nobody to cheer. If a noble sage murders a saint, or a hellhound saves the innocent from the scheming Jezebel, which one gets the lady’s favour? If neither deserve her favour, or both deserve it equally, yet one of them must die, perhaps something has gone horribly wrong. And so, they must mould us and we cannot do anything to change it.”  
“We can.” Francis contested, as Mary and the room both faded from view. They were leaving. They had done what they had been left to do. “You’re not the only one who knows what to burn.”

It fell to Walsingham to destroy the evidence; and he was confident he had succeeded.  
He had the first sense of being examined when he met Marlowe. The young spy’s eyes seemed to make a study of him, noting and storing everything in his head. For the first time in years, Walsingham felt that he was being observed equally as shrewdly as he himself was observing. They would make a judgement of him, he knew, all those eyes yet unborn. He intended to leave judgement only to God; and in order to do it he would lay the texture of his life upon the altar, each word an Isaac.

His portrait could stay. Walsingham had always loved how it concealed as much as it revealed. He knew Burghley wanted the state papers, and those revealed nothing but statecraft. They could mould him and shape him all they wanted, but he would give them only a hollow shell. He would hold the truth from them, cling to it with cold dead fingers.

His mawkish attempts at composition he burned out of sheer embarrassment. His private prayers and reflections followed. His spiritual life was a matter between himself and God, as private as a love affair. Notes, sketches, drafts, exercises, all joined their forefathers in the hearth. There was no-one to tend them. Frances had always preferred verse and company to dense books and solitude, and Burghley would either toss them aside or worse, keep them for his own amusement. Francis watched as his life curled and folded in on itself, crumbling and dying away.

He hesitated, holding his younger daughter’s shaky attempts at penmanship. Surely he could keep those, just a little longer. She was gone, he reminded himself, and where she had gone, they must follow. He could not take them with him. Better a quick fiery destruction than a long and lingering second death in the mouths of rodents. Catholics would say one thing, Protestants another. Neither would care what Mary Walsingham ever had to say.

“My life is my own,” he told the fire, but his words were emptier than blank pages. It was as if Campion’s executioner had shoved his black and bloodied hand down Francis’ throat and pulled out his insides, leaving him whole but hollow, and ready to be reworked.


End file.
